ANDERSON, Kevin. 0.5 billion climate holocaust survivors

Professor Kevin
Anderson is the Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK. Professor Anderson, together
with Dr Alice Bows wrote an extremely important paper describing 6-8% annual GHG emissions reductions needed for 450 ppm CO2-equivalent (CO2-e): “According
to the analysis conducted in this paper, stabilizing at 450 ppmv [carbon
dioxide equivalent = CO2-e, atmospheric concentration measured in parts per
million by volume] requires, at least, global energy related emissions to peak
by 2015, rapidly decline at 6-8% per year between 2020 and 2040, and for full
decarbonization sometime soon after 2050 …Unless economic growth can be
reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6% per
year), it is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic
recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650 ppmv CO2-e
... Ultimately, the latest scientific understanding of climate change
allied with current emissions trends and a commitment to “limiting average global
temperature increases to below 4oC above pre-industrial levels”,
demands a radical reframing of both the climate change agenda, and the economic
characterization of contemporary society” (see: Kevin Anderson & Alice
Bows, “Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission
trends”, Proc. Trans. Roy. Soc, A, 2008: http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf
; Gideon Polya, “Good and bad
climate news”, Green Blog, 2009: http://www.green-blog.org/2009/01/13/good-and-bad-climate-news/
; and George Monbiot, “One shot left”, Monbiot.com (also published in the UK
Guardian, 2008): http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/11/25/one-shot-left/
).

Professor Kevin Anderson on
how many will survive the century in a “terrifying prospect” (November 2009): “For
humanity it's a matter of life or death. We will not make all human beings
extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in
the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it's extremely unlikely
that we wouldn't have mass death at 4C. If you have got a population of nine
billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a billion people
surviving… The worst possible result at Copenhagen is a bad deal where the
world leaders have to come home and say it's a good deal when its rubbish. That's
the real danger – that they will feel under pressure to sign up to anything.
That could lock us into something bad for the next ten years." [1].